Garden of Zen |brought to you by architectural + eco hero Rudabeh Pakravan

For my dear friend Iranian-American, San Francisco based architect Rudabeh Pakravan, no project is outside her scope.

Garden of Zen |brought to you by architectural + eco hero Rudabeh Pakravan

She’s a published and award winning civic, commercial and residential architect whose hands and visions customarily play with indoor materials and spaces.  With her engineering (UC Berkeley) and architectural (University of Pennsylvania) studies background and her years of experience out on the field, she aligns gorgeous design, high performance, ecology and sustainability — with the clients’ needs.

Pakravan’s most recent feat involves taking these same inspirations and skill set to the backyard.

For one couple living in the Oakland hills, a dry garden was the ideal solution to their problem: an unappealing backyard. The narrow, walled-in space was small and awkward, and the overgrown, jungle-esque hillside looming over it only made it worse. The homeowners knew the yard needed a face-lift.

The couple turned to Rudabeh Pakravan, a designer, architect, and UC Berkeley lecturer, to convert the nonfunctional backyard into a chic and stunning oasis, proving that ample square footage—or even water—isn’t necessary to create something beautiful.

Read here to see how Pakravan visualized and coalesced functional prerequisites and aesthetic concepts into perfect Garden of Zen magnificence.

(For all you Berkeley people, GREEN DAY is on the cover of the issue.)